Plasma Pool

Seinfeld’s declared motto was “No hugging, no learning,” but it’s come to be defined more frequently by its popular moniker, “the show about nothing.” Despite the moniker’s popularity and its proliferation as the conceptual foundation of the show, its motto ultimately captures the spirit of the show far better. Even and especially after the departure of co-creator Larry David, Seinfeld’s adherence to its “no hugging, no learning” directive became ever more stringent.

Late seasons of Seinfeld are especially violent and callous when compared with their less absurdist predecessors. The event that perhaps most clearly signaled this shift—and it was a gradual shift, without definite boundaries—is the critically ballyhooed killing-off, in a counter-cliffhanger at the end of the program’s seventh season (”The Invitations“), of George Costanza’s fiancé Susan Ross by the poisonous adhesive paste on the extraordinarily cheap wedding-invitation envelopes George scroogily selects. On hearing of his fiancé’s sudden unexpected death, George turns away from the doctor, to his three fellows—Jerry, Elaine, Kramer—and asks if they’d like to go for coffee.

The preponderance of this sort of pseudo-absurdity in the later seasons often leads to their dismissal as inferior the early seasons, especially the second through the sixth, all of which won increasingly voluble critical acclaim for their innovatively frank comedic treatment of the strangeness of human interaction: waiting for a table in a Chinese restaurant, for instance. When first pitched, the storyline of the second-season episode “The Chinese Restaurant,” set entirely in the lobby of a Chinese restaurant, was feared to be too strange for American TV. Would primetime network audiences really want to these already bizarre characters sit and stew in a single, crowded room with their hunger and neuroses for an entire twenty-two minutes? Would anyone watch that much nothing?

The answer, of course, was a resounding yes. This was a nothing that nineties-dwellers knew. Stifling the repulsion and discomfort of encountering an ugly baby (”The Hamptons“) or an old woman with an enormous goiter (”The Old Man“). Getting stuck on a smelly subway car on the way to a lesbian wedding (”The Subway“). “Breaking up” with a platonic friend (”Male Unbonding“). Getting robbed anonymously (”The Robbery“), or by a cleaning hire (”The Statue“). Accidentally getting a busboy fired (”The Busboy“). Getting lost in a labyrinthine parking garage (”The Parking Garage“). Fighting over a parking space (”The Parking Space“). Masturbating (”The Contest“). Seinfeld built its base of critical and popular recognition by aggressively and unabashedly scrutinizing and populating the voids of everyday life.

But as the series progressed, it moved away from scrutinizing these voids—with storylines and situations in which we could usually genuinely recognize ourselves in one form or another—and toward plots that were not just ridiculous but violent. Seinfeld got harder. The premiere of the eighth season, “The Foundation,” has Kramer rationalizing physically fighting young children with a personal philosophy whose urtext is Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. Soon thereafter, in “The Little Kicks,” Jerry is forced at gunpoint by a junk food loving thug-aesthete to bootleg a movie and George’s father Frank Costanza picks a fight with Elaine in a the lobby of a police station. (”You want a piece of me? You’ve got it!”). Jerry’s Uncle Leo is caught in a house fire in “The Package“; and Frank—in the midst of a PTSD-rooted flashback—overturns a buffet of authentic Jewish delicacies at a Jewish singles night Kramer stages in “The Fatigues.” In “The Checks,” Jerry inadvertently attacks a group of Japanese businessmen with an axe; in “The Andrea Doria” Elaine attacks a love interest with an eating utensil; and the episode “The Little Jerry” is named after a large brown rooster, “Little Jerry Seinfeld,” whom Kramer acquires and pushes into cockfights. A street gang called “The Van Buren Boys” (christened for our nation’s eighth president, who apparently pulled no punches) hassles Kramer and then George in an episode of the same name. In “The Pothole,” Kramer accidentally engulfs Newman’s mail truck and Newman himself, obliviously crooning to radio soft-rock, in flames. And in “The Nap,” Kramer, mistaken for a corpse, is wrapped up in a sack and dumped in the East River.

The ninth season compounds the show’s violent turn early and with renewed force. Newman attempts to eat Kramer, whom he mistakes for a succulent turkey, in “The Butter Shave,” the season premiere. Next, in “The Voice,” Kramer drops a giant ball of oil out of George’s office window onto the head of Jerry’s unsuspecting girlfriend. This comes partially because George, who had been faking a disability to get a private handicapped bathroom, gets run down by a small horde of enraged senior citizens on motorized scooters. “The Serenity Now” is incredibly violent: Jerry—at his girlfriend’s urging—explodes with rage at his girlfriend; Kramer destroys 25 computers after being attacked by a small horde of neighborhood kids; Estelle Costanza attempts to run over her husband Frank, who screams “Hoochie momma!” in protest. Elaine (who has ramped up her tendency to shove and exclaim Get out! when surprised) clobbers Kramer on a suburban porch in “The Blood” in order to prove to a friend that she’s safe and responsible; Jerry, also in “The Blood,” is tied and dragged behind his car by lunatic octogenarian personal trainer Izzy Mandelbaum. “The Merv Griffin Show” finds Jerry, George, and Elaine drugging a woman to gain access to her toy collection; “The Strike” finds Frank physically beating George as part of the celebration of Festivus; and “The Puerto Rican Day” finds Kramer pursued by Puerto Rican paraders after accidentally burning the Puerto Rican flag. And then, finally, comes “The Finale,” which finds our four friends locked away in a Massachusetts prison for mocking rather than aiding an overweight mugging victim.

“The Finale” is one of the sorriest and most underwhelming series finales on record. In it, a parade of guest-star characters from Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer’s past show up to testify at their trial to their longstanding crassness and cruelty—which is, for no particular reason, seen as materially relevant to the case. Everyone from Jackie Chiles to the Soup Nazi indict the four for their misdeeds. But prior to the finale, their actions weren’t misdeeds at all. In the world of the show their actions, however hurtful, were often unintentional and rarely malicious. These actions were the form and substance of the show; they carried forth Larry David’s “No hugging, no learning” order. All the stranger, then, that David himself penned the finale, in which the show’s theoretical underpinning, the possibility of a non-malicious indifference to the suffering of others generating comedy—a possibility David has taken to new heights with Curb Your Enthusiasm—is sternly rebuked. Why David saw fit to topple, in one flamboyant stroke, the callously funny world he and Seinfeld had spent nine years building is an open question.